It takes a good poet to strike a clear note, with no indecision, in the
opening lines of his poem, as Dyer does in _The Country Walk_:
I am resolv'd, this charming day,
In the open fields to stray;
And have no roof above my head
But that whereon the Gods do tread.
His landscapes are delicately etched, and are loved for their own sake:
And there behold a bloomy mead,
A silver stream, a willow shade,
Beneath the shade a fisher stand,
Who, with the angle in his hand,
Swings the nibbling fry to land.
It would be absurd to speak solemnly of Dyer's debt to Milton; he is an
original poet; but the writer of the lines quoted above can never have
been blind to the beauties of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_. His two
arts brought him little material prosperity; in 1740 he took orders in
the Church of England, and in his later years did harm to his fame by a
long industrial poem called _The Fleece_, which has on it none of the dew
that glistens on his youthful verses.
James Thomson, who won a great reputation in his own age, was the son of
a parish minister in Scotland. He was educated in Edinburgh, and came to
London to seek his fortune. All Thomson's work shows the new tendencies
in poetry struggling with the accepted fashions. His language in _The
Seasons_ is habitually rhetorical and stilted, yet there is hardly a page
without its vignettes of truth and beauty.
Pages:
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50